Lower Manhattan National Park

[Image: Past Futures, Present, Futures at Storefront for Art and Architecture, designed by Leong Leong; photo by Naho Kubota].

A two-part exhibition called Past Futures, Present, Futures opened its second phase—Present, Futures—tonight at Storefront for Art and Architecture, exploring contemporary "reenactments" of classic architectural images, specifically showcasing new versions of "101 unrealized proposals for New York City, dating from its formation to today."

With exhibition design by Leong Leong, the resulting space is silvered, gleaming, and literally reflective, a curved maze of mirrored blinds.

[Images: Past Futures, Present, Futures at Storefront for Art and Architecture, designed by Leong Leong; photos by Naho Kubota].

Working in collaboration, John Becker and I were asked to "re-enact" Lebbeus Woods's 1999 image Lower Manhattan, with the rules specifying no more than 10 hours to work on the resulting version and no more than 400 words for the accompanying text.

We decided to be both straight-forward and tongue-in-cheek, proposing a Lower Manhattan National Park, a world of revealed canyons, caves, scenic plateaux, and, later, hiking trails, all brought to light—and newfound aridity—by monumental dams and seawalls built in the near future.

The image and text (exactly 400 words!) appear below—and the full exhibition, featuring new variant images by everyone from Candy Chang to Christian Kerrigan, BIG to dpr-barcelona, Margaret Bursa & Johan Hybschmann to Sean Lally, amongst dozens and dozens of others, is open through November 24.

[Image: Lower Manhattan National Park by John Becker and Geoff Manaugh].

Lower Manhattan National Park

In 2057, massive flood-control structures protecting New York City from the rising seas required a redirecting of the Hudson and East Rivers northeast, into Long Island Sound. The resulting dams—the construction of which triggered small earthquakes throughout New England—allowed for the draining of the old riverbed south and east of Manhattan, revealing the unearthly geological circumstances on which this archipelagic metropolis sits.

Following several years of scientific surveys into the mazelike gorges and intersecting cliffsides below—complex terrestrial forms previously buried by the waters and mud at the edge of the city—teams from the Army Corps of Engineers set about clearing the region from more than a hundred thousand years’ worth of silt and debris flowing down from the upper watershed. Even shipwrecks going back to the Colonial era were dredged, blasted, and removed—in some cases, the wrecks’ dried and re-kilned timber used to build houses elsewhere in the city.

The resulting reclaimed landscape of gorges, cataracts, caves, slopes, and arches was unlike anything seen in another city—as if the Grand Canyon had been discovered suddenly cleaving Shanghai in two. And thus a new National Park was swiftly declared: Lower Manhattan National Park, its name partially inspired by architect Lebbeus Woods, a New Yorker who explored the urban possibilities offered by damming the city’s rivers in a proposal back in 1999.

By 2076, the nation’s three-hundredth birthday, Lower Manhattan National Park was open to the public, encompassing hiking trails, campsites, interpretive routes, and modern visitors’ centers that unlocked the city’s depths for amateur exploration. For generations, bankers had no idea that, just off the fiscal cliff at the end of their well-known street, the Wall Street Gorges would soon loom, an extraordinary district of trails smelling vaguely of sea salt; or that, within walking distance of Chinatown, switchbacks would lead steeply down into the shadows of a marine void off the Lower East Side. There are the Hudson Caves; the Brooklyn Bridges (a nest of suspension bridges spanning boroughs); Governors Tower (formerly Governors Island); and, of course, the New Wall—the East River Dam itself—now an athletic attraction to people all over the world, lined with climbing routes and ornamental handholds.

New Yorkers once fearful of the rising waters of climate change now look down into vast canyons surrounding the city, lined with historic plaques explaining how this newest of National Parks was born.

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Wall Mart

[Image: From a student project by Adrienne Lau at the Bartlett School of Architecture].

While digging around this morning through my embarrassingly disorganized hard drive, I found a project I'd saved a while back by Adrienne Lau, a student at the Bartlett School of Architecture in London. Lau came to New York City last spring on a research visit with the Bartlett's Unit 11, led by Smout Allen.

[Image: From a student project by Adrienne Lau at the Bartlett School of Architecture].

We actually hosted Lau and her fellow students for a public crit—and to give them personal workspace—at Studio-X NYC, after putting together a series of tours around the city, visiting sites of infrastructure (including the extraordinary Holland Tunnel vent structure and a ConEd steam generation plant).

[Image: From a student project by Adrienne Lau at the Bartlett School of Architecture].

In any case, with New York as her project's chosen location, Lau explored the spatial possibilities offered by informal street vending, eventually inverting, in her words, the concept of the floating market. Boat-like structures are, instead, routed through the sky via rails, lifts, and crossings bolted onto or otherwise suspended from the fronts of buildings.

As Lau describes it, "verticality links the street and midair" as "inverted boats trade with dangling pockets," pockets that hold everything from bouquets of cut flowers to morning newspapers, and "plug-in units with hoppers and platforms" skate above the street on wall-mounted tracks.

The economy of street—or river—vendors thus becomes an interconnected maze of vertically stratified carts and platforms, more like transportation systems found in old mines than something on the horizon for contemporary New York City.

[Images: From a student project by Adrienne Lau at the Bartlett School of Architecture].

With very few illustrated exceptions—

[Image: From a student project by Adrienne Lau at the Bartlett School of Architecture].

—it is a story told through models: highly detailed models using things such as cable nail clamps, cardboard silhouettes, coat hangers, tracing paper, and beads.

[Image: From a student project by Adrienne Lau at the Bartlett School of Architecture].

It could almost be a set for a stop-motion film about the future of urban distribution systems—perhaps yet more proof that architecture, creative writing, and film departments need to start collaborating ASAP, if only for the students to get an informative glimpse of how other industries operate.

[Images: From a student project by Adrienne Lau at the Bartlett School of Architecture].

For now, it's worth simply taking a look at Lau's retro-futurist vision of urban newsstands, bolt-on decking, and street life reinvigorated from above.

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Cliff Nest

Reader Louis Schulz recently sent me a link to an incredible set of photos by Eric Valli, a French photographer and former cabinetmaker whose work has taken him all over the world visiting, among other places, the vertiginous and mind-bending world of "honey hunters" in the Himalayas.

However, Louis specifically drew my attention to the visual similarities between the so-called "Shadow Hunters" of underground Thailand and the work of architect Lebbeus Woods.

[Image: Photo by, and copyright, Eric Valli from "Shadow Hunters"].

"In the dark caves of Thailand," Valli explains, "generations of men have risked their lives to obtain a prized commodity—edible bird's nests, essential ingredients of a traditional Chinese soup."

[Image: Photo by, and copyright, Eric Valli from "Shadow Hunters"].

Reaching these nests—found deep within coastal and mountain caves—requires the construction and use of bamboo scaffolding, complicated and rickety architectures of ladders, cranes, attachments, and nearly invisible footholds through which the nest-hunters must paradoxically, in a sense, ascend into the already claustrophobic spaces underground.

[Image: Photo by, and copyright, Eric Valli from "Shadow Hunters"].

Lit only by torchlight, these nests lashed together by humans to reach the nests lashed together by birds are extraordinary and acrobatic constructions, well-compared, I think, to Lebbeus's work, suggesting a unique theatrical stage-set or stadium for seemingly impossible spatial athletics.

Contrast this, for instance, with the farmed equivalent of these wild caves, where bird's nest are basically grown to order inside windowless monoliths, what Nicola Twilley describes as "custom built concrete birds' nest factories... towering above traditional one-story structures and transforming the urban landscape" in Asian cities.

The internal design of these bird's nest farms—or swiftlet hotels, as they are sometimes called—is fascinating: the buildings are intended to mimic caves, with a carefully spaced matrix of wooden rafters replacing the ledges and crannies of a cave ceiling, and detailed attention paid to internal temperature, humidity, and even sound

In any case, how fantastic it would be to see a little pamphlet someday documenting these vernacular structures—subterranean nest-harvesting infrastructures from the mountain caves of Thailand—perhaps something from Princeton Architectural Press or a feature in Domus...

See Eric Valli's website for more.

(Thanks to Louis Schultz for the link).

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Sleeping Astronaut Causes Earthquake on the Moon

[Image: NASA's lunar seismometer, via Wikipedia].

First of all, I know it's inaccurate to say there was an "earthquake" on the moon, but I'll use the phrase nonetheless.

In any case, I was delighted to read that the tax-funded Apollo 11 astronauts, upon landing on the surface of the moon, installed a seismometer "sensitive enough to detect Neil Armstrong's movements during sleep," in the words of Wikipedia. The movement of a dreaming astronaut recorded as a tectonic event in space.

From a project called the "Johnson Space Center Oral History Project"—specifically, an interview with Dr. Don Lind, released in May 2005:

This [instrument was] deployed about thirty feet from the Lunar Module, and during the first night on the Moon, the crew had gone back [into the Lunar Module]. They were sleeping before the takeoff the next morning. And the seismic station picked up something. They didn’t think it was a meteor impact at a distance. It was something really close. So the science team called the Mission Control Room and said, “Did some relief valve just go off, or did some mechanical [operation] go on in the Lunar Module?”

They went down the line and quizzed every single [controller]. The last one on these surveys was always the flight surgeon. When they got to him, he said, “Oh yes. Exactly at that moment, Neil turned over in the hammock.” That was registered on the seismometer thirty feet away out on the lunar surface. [That’s how sensitive it was.] That was very satisfying.

A sleeping astronaut causes earthquakes on the moon! There are few images as evocative as the idea of slumbering astronauts from another planet, huge and dreaming, unleashing waves of seismic activity across the celestial body they've landed on, like gods rolling over in their sleep.

Or, reversing this, as if you could perform a kind of dream analysis on sleeping astronauts by reading between the lines of inexplicable seismic disturbances. Seismic dream therapy applied to visitors from another world.

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Memorial to a Buried Village

[Image: From the project "Resonance, memory" by Bo Li and Ge Men, students at ETH Zürich].

An interesting new project by Bo Li and Ge Men, students of architecture at ETH Zürich, proposes a kind of buried chandelier to memorialize lost villages in Switzerland—architecture destroyed by landslides, replaced by light.

[Image: A "long section" from "Resonance, memory" by Bo Li and Ge Men].

From the 2012 International VELUX Award, where this project won first place:

Inspired by the many hiking trips that the two students from China have enjoyed during their studies at ETHZ, the entry is based on the idea of a hypothetical mudflow in the Swiss Alps burying a village. The project works with columns of transparent thermoplastic planted into the earth as a metaphorical representation of the former village. Sunlight is being transmitted through the columns into the subterranean space, where they illuminate a poetic memory of the former rooms in the buried houses.

Visitors can thus walk around beneath the surface of the Earth, exploring buried rooms of light.

[Image: From "Resonance, memory" by Bo Li and Ge Men].

To a certain extent, the project brings to mind the odd memorial known as the Cretto di Burri, by artist Alberto Burri, in which an Italian village called Gibellina, destroyed by an earthquake in 1968, was replaced—or, rather, memorialized—by a field of poured concrete: "Burri covered the streets of Old Gibellina with concrete, preserving the layout of the blocks. Walking around his monument is unsettling. You’re not just standing on the gravestone of a city, but actually tracing the lines of its corpse."

In Bo Li and Ge Men's case, however, you not only can walk the plan of the old village, street by street and corner by corner, following the forest of "transparent thermoplastic" sticks that break the surface of the landslide to mark the positions of destroyed buildings; you can also do so from below, where glowing houses illuminate an artificial cavern carved into the landslide.

[Image: The plan of the old village, seen from above, from "Resonance, memory" by Bo Li and Ge Men].

I will admit, meanwhile, that when I first saw the image that opens this post, I actually thought it was a proposal to mark the remains of villages submerged by the construction of dams—deliberately flooded towns still known to reappear when droughts pull water levels to seasonal lows. You could thus dive down into murky lakes and reservoirs and see the shining cages of houses sacrificed by an earlier generation, a radiant architecture beneath the waves.

For a bit more information about the project, stop by the International VELUX Award showcase.

(Thanks to Luka Piskorec, the students' teacher, for the tip!)

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Landscapes by Remote Control

One of many interesting things I've been reading this month is the new book by William J. Clancey, Working on Mars: Voyages of Scientific Discovery with the Mars Exploration Rovers.

[Image: Curiosity pokes its heavily instrumented "head" around the Red Planet; photo courtesy of NASA and U.S. taxpayers].

Clancey's look at the "robotic geologists" humans have sent to Mars over the past decade explores the strange phenomenon of science-at-a-distance, pursued, measured, recorded, and analyzed by human controllers located on another planet.

This is, in Clancey's words, "a unique human-robotic enterprise," by way of "teleoperated robots" or "telerobotic tools."

[Image: Curiosity looks back at the "Morse road" it has created; photo courtesy of NASA].

The book is very much academic—i.e. it is not a New Yorker-style profile of mission scientists in their lab at Pasadena—but it nonetheless reveals the bizarre methodological requirements of working on another planet through remotely controlled machine-surrogates. From altered sleep-patterns (to keep pace with the longer days on Mars) to darkened window shades (to enact on Earth the darkness of the Martian nightfall for rovers), the actual practices of the scientists come to the foreground of Clancey's study.

It is through these practices that the humans can engage with and control—or at least efficiently keep track of—these radically off-site prosthetic extensions, the rover now understood as "a mechanism that can be 'acted through,' an extended embodiment of the human eyes and hands of the people who control its actions from Earth."

It is a remotely operated surrogate sensory apparatus—organs without a body.

[Images: Curiosity on Mars; photos courtesy of NASA].

Yet, even as these deliberately chosen images show—images taken by me from NASA's website, not from Clancey's book—it is hard to resist what Clancey himself takes critical issue with, which is the personification of these "robot geologists" as they trundle around the Martian environment, peering at things, laser-zapping rocks, craning their heads—"heads"—around like ostriches and setting off across the landscape afresh, solar-recharged, every morning.

[Image: Curiosity on Mars; photo courtesy of NASA].

Emotionally identifying with the Mars rovers not only leads to the use of anatomical metaphors, such as those present in the previous sentence; it also, Clancey argues, clouds the notion of what it means to do science at all. "These inspirational descriptions have a place," he writes in the book's introduction, "but we must understand this new technology and articulate how it has worked so well if we are to know how to use and improve it." Overarching questions about how humans and robots might exchange their roles in this undertaking—whether it's the phrase "robot geologists" or a reversal of this situation with computer-guided "human tools" more like the astronauts in 2001—are, he writes, "technically and philosophically confused."

The obvious benefit of non-scientific attachment between humans and their charismatic machines is that it is exactly these identifications that catalyze public enthusiasm for extraordinarily expensive scientific expeditions. But debunking myths of robot charisma is only part of Clancey's purpose, as his book begins, instead, with a more or less anthropological study of the Earth-bound laboratory and the constantly changing teams of human beings within it, as they deploy and operate long-distance geologic tools, naming the terrain, mapping the landmarks, coordinating survey information, and chemically sensing the Martian landscape through surrogate "bodies" of complex instrumentation.

In other words, we might be busy anthropomorphizing machines, but the humans actually engaged with these off-world robotic tools are themselves realizing how they must adapt to the needs of the devices, to the tools' own scientific and sensory limits, and to what these instruments can and cannot do in as distant a location as Mars.

[Image: Curiosity on Mars; photo courtesy of NASA].

In any case, Clancey's book is worth checking out if this sort of thing interests you. However, it seems worth noting here briefly that this could also be put into the context of, say, art historian Barbara Maria Stafford's 2001 essay on "devices of wonder," or the interpretive machines and intermediary technical instruments that "not only constrain what it is possible to see but also determine what can be thought" by those who use them; as well as the idea, mentioned previously, of the "prosthetic imaginary," or "a more metaphorical notion of the 'prosthetic' as an extended tool that becomes a proxy, or a substitute for experience."

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Founding Landscapes

Over the past few years, I've posted enthusiastic overviews of various books by Robert Sullivan, including The Meadowlands and Rats.

[Image: Robert Sullivan's My American Revolution: Crossing the Delaware and I-78 from FSG].

Rats, in particular, reveals a perspective on the city so often overlooked and perhaps so revolting—the city as seen through the eyes of professional pest specialists and rat catchers—that it is unfortunately quite easy to miss the fascinating insights into New York's history that such a viewpoint entails. From archaeology—discovering that now long-buried earthworks from the Revolutionary War are still breeding grounds for rats—to rat-resistant material science, where steel wool is mixed into concrete to slow the animals' ability to chew through walls, Sullivan's book is memorable, worthwhile, and hard to stop thinking about once you're through.

I'm thus very much looking forward not only to meeting Robert Sullivan in person next week, but doing so as part of a public event at Studio-X NYC. That will be a live interview—free and open to the public—hosted in recognition of Sullivan's newest book, My American Revolution: Crossing the Delaware and I-78.

This new book is premised on two main themes: the terrain and weather of New York City, and how these both worked to shape the Revolutionary War against English troops in the 18th century. These "founding landscapes," in Sullivan's words, literally guided and formed those events—a fairly obvious claim, of course, but one that takes on the air of an archaeological expedition or a landscape detective story as Sullivan sets off by car, boat, and, most importantly, foot to track down the old routes, campgrounds, overlooks, signaling hills, and other waypoints used to such liberating effect nearly 250 years ago.

As Sullivan phrases it, "I began to work like a scout, going out on reconnaissance missions into a landscape that might not appear ancient, camouflaged as it is by cities and strip malls, by toxic waste sites, and high-end commercial properties." Or, in the words of the New York Times, for Sullivan, "history is not so much a collection of dates and facts but actual places you can revisit—layers of geography that can be excavated one by one."

After all, as anyone interested in military history will already know, winning a battle—let alone an entire war—comes down in many ways simply to a more strategically informed use of the landscape, beyond even the quality or impact of the weapons at hand; and Sullivan uses the book to suggest that the topography and the climate of the New York region opened certain opportunities while foreclosing others for the colonial insurgents. This is done in typical Sullivan fashion, mind you; the Washington Post, for instance, calls the book "almost entirely eccentric" and "about as far from a conventional account of that conflict as one could get," yet both of these are meant in a positive sense. It is a book of asides, footnotes, detours, and second thoughts.

[Image: A map of selected Revolutionary War sites and landscapes in greater New York, courtesy of Robert Sullivan].

In any case, we'll be talking to Sullivan about his new book—as well as about rats and the Meadowlands and much more—at 6:30pm on Tuesday, October 16th. We'll also get a sneak peek at some of the behind-the-scenes techniques Sullivan uses to write his books, including his fascinating personal books about his books: part collage, part notebook, part bound filing system, these books-of-the-books detail Sullivan's own process of writing and assembling the eventual published artifact.

As an aside, My American Revolution makes an interesting pair with Steven Jaffe's New York at War: Four Centuries of Combat, Fear, and Intrigue in Gotham, which I've mentioned a few times here previously.

Jaffe's own tour through the overlooked—and ongoing—militarization of the New York landscape, from Wall Street (named after the literal defensive wall that once stood on the site) to the coastal fortifications that still stand in places along the NYC shoreline, is a compelling and unforgettable read. Getting Jaffe and Sullivan to speak together at Studio-X NYC, perhaps, about their work would be a fascinating possibility.

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